Kate Becker: With grace and precision, Curiosity nails a 10.0 landing

By Kate Becker, For the Camera

Posted:
08/09/2012 06:36:59 PM MDT

Updated:
08/09/2012 06:40:23 PM MDT

Mars Science Laboratory team members celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., after the successful landing of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars on Sunday.
(
Damian Dovarganes
)

Watching Olympic gymnastics last week, I was struck by the unlikeliness of it all: that a human body could leap so high, pinwheel through the air and finally land --two feet down and two arms up -- as assuredly as a key sliding into a lock.

Yet, every four years, the world (which usually pays little attention to gymnastics) is treated to just that: amazing displays of equal parts muscle and grace, thrust and precision, preparation and inspiration.

Who would believe that an 8,500-pound craft, riding on a million pounds of fuel, could execute an eight-month journey and land -- six wheels down and mast up -- on another planet? Just like the best gymnastic performances, it required brute force and cold exactitude. And, like gymnastics, it required acknowledging the very real risk of crashing to the ground.

In the women's all-around event, gymnasts compete in four different events. Curiosity will be "competing" on 10 different pieces of apparatus -- if by apparatus, you mean scientific instrument. Curiosity's suite of instruments -- which includes cameras, a laser spectrometer, a robotic arm and more -- is designed to reveal whether Mars has (or once had) the ingredients necessary for life to take hold.

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Yet for all that scientific firepower, the Curiosity rover is not so much bigger than a gymnast. The new sweetheart of gymnastics, Gabby Douglas, is less than 5 feet tall. Curiosity is about 9 feet long, and its mast stretches up to 7 feet. All in all, Curiosity is probably about the size of a car Douglas might drive.

From here, though, the differences become more dramatic. On a trampoline, a gymnast can fly more than 30 feet in the air. That's pretty impressive. But the Mars Science Laboratory can fly 30 feet in less than a hundredth of a second, and it traveled more than 350 million miles before coming to rest on Mars' red soil.

Kate Becker

Speaking of landings: To land on the balance beam, a gymnast must hit a target just 4 inches wide. MSL is aiming for a target 12 miles wide. On this score, the gymnasts seem to have MSL beat -- until you consider that MSL was traveling at 13,200 mph just a few minutes before it fluttered down to its landing site.

And for all the minute, moment-by-moment mid-air course corrections a gymnast can perform, over the final months of its journey to the Red Planet, MSL had just six opportunities to fire its thrusters and tweak its trajectory before entering Mars' atmosphere.

Which brings us to the most dramatic part of all: the dismount. Because Curiosity is so heavy, none of the tried-and-true landing strategies would do. So engineers designed a series of maneuvers that required the spacecraft to fire 76 pyrotechnic devices as it morphed into six different configurations during its seven-minute, 1,600-degree Fahrenheit descent through the atmosphere.

The routine ended with the most dramatic flourish of all: a "sky crane" maneuver in which a harness of nylon cables gently lowered the Curiosity rover to the ground. Hovering just a few stories in the Martian air, Curiosity sprung its wheels and suspension into place. Finally, descending at less than 2 mph, it made its landing.

I didn't see any gymnasts doing that on the balance beam.

Watching the faces of the scientists and engineers at mission control as they got the signal at the rover was safe, I recognized the same expression that I've seen on the faces of those gold-medal athletes: the staggering smile that comes from having your darkest doubts proved wrong and your wildest hopes proved right.

The feat that once seemed so unlikely is done; it is real. But for Curiosity, the prize won't be gold -- it will be red.

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